CiviCRM 3.4.beta3 and 4.0.beta3 released

The team is excited to announce the release of third pair of betas for CiviCRM 3.4 and 4.0!

An remember - if you didn't already, make sure you read "Step up and help out" section of this blog post!

The newest versions are:

4.0.beta3 for Drupal 7 and Joomla 1.6

3.4.beta3 for Drupal 6 and Joomla 1.5

Please remember this is an BETA release and it should NOT be used on production sites - however, we enourage you to install it on your test sites and let us know about any bugs or problems. If you want to find out what's the beta/final release schedule - it is available on our wiki.

There are a few public sandboxes where you can try one (or many) of above versions:

Step up and help out!

The moment of releasing CiviCRM 3.4.beta3 and 4.0.beta3 is a great occasion to get involved in CiviCRM community. There are many ways you can help make this release better and bug free.

Log in to the one of the sandboxes and try out your favourite features. If you find a problem, please report it on the appropriate forum board. Remember that sandbox data is periodically reset.

Download the tarball and upgrade a copy of your site to 3.4 or 4.0 - let us know if you encounter any problems. This is an especially valuable contribution since we need to have the upgrade process tested on different sets of data. After you've done this, play around with your favourite features, with your local data. Problems appearing? Use the CiviCRM 3.4 and 4.0 release testing board on the forums to discuss problems and find answers!

If you're a developer and have PHP skills, we strongly encourage you to develop and attach a code patch AND a unit test along with any bug you report through our issue tracker. Ping us on IRC if you need help figuring out how to do this.

What's new?

Quick list of the most prominent new features and improvements in this release:

Downloads

You can download the release from SourceForge - select from the civicrm-latest section. The filenames include the 3.4beta3 and 4.0beta3 labels, e.g. civicrm-3.4.beta3-drupal.tar.gz or civicrm-4.0.beta3-joomla.tar.gz. Make sure you're downloading the correct version: for Drupal or Joomla. Again, remember that 4.0 works with Joomla 1.6/Drupal 7 and 3.4 works with Joomla 1.5/Drupal 6.

New Installations

If you are installing CiviCRM 3.4.beta3 from scratch, please use the corresponding automated installer instructions: